location:

M5 Street Performance Festival, Berlin Moabit

in cooperation with Kunstverein Tiergarten

date:

Aug 28th, 2010

collaborator:

Navina Hausmann, fashion photographer assistant

Artist portrait in Bruno online magazin

Other photos by J. Schünemann

On the streets of a Metropole, a different “Cat Walk”
The performance of the performance artist Birgit Ramsauer at a traffic light in Berlin, Moabit, 2010

Artist, concept; director: Birgit Ramsauer
Participants: a make up artist, a stylist, the fashion photographer Navina Hausmann, a assistant, pedestrians and cars
Photographer: Birgit Ramsauer, Frank Johann, Jens Schünemann

The streets of a metropol become a cat walk for the people living there. Knowing and preparing for the walk the single person is going to put her/himself knowingly into the set of the city always related to the personal mood of the day.
A concentration of a cat walk scenery is a traffic light environment. Waiting for the green light the cars, the bikes are watching the passing pedestrians. The become a voyeur.
This ready made cat walk I use for a very special mirroring situation, putting a real cat walk there, which will at a certain point overtake the environment and include the crowd at the traffic light.
Birgit Ramsauer, who lives and works in Berlin and New York, directs the “Cat Walk-in” knowingly into a street performance, without leaving the artificial setting of the fashion shooting. The pedestrians, the cars the bikes become out of a sudden an activ part of the shooting, the transfer into a shooting.
The model sits down on the hood of a car, it shares a bike, it leads a baby carriage and it tries to enter a cat waiting at the traffic light.
The borderline between Voyeurism and “Street Cat Walk-in” become blurred within the focus of the fashion photographer’s camera perspective. She cuts the scenerie out of reality into a fashion shooting.

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About the district of Moabit within Berlin:
This special district is known for its ethnic variety. The district has formed a very special cultural and social structur. Turmstrasse is the main street of Moabit. From the dander mile to a cheap shopping area the character changed enormeously within the last decades.
Politics try to activate the “public and social interest” into the Turmstrasse again. That for they focus on art, especially performance art to open up a new perspective to the variety of the different ethnic groups in the district.